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by spollo 3237 days ago
That's actually a very normal technique and one of the reasons professionally cooked food tastes so much better than most home cooked food. Frequent salting at different points of cooking improves the overall flavour of the dish, and seasoning ingredients separately can help with coverage.

Additionally something seasoned at the start of cooking won't be "salty" like if you were to add salt directly on the food after its plated.

You don't add a crap ton of salt 5 times, just a pinch here and there and the outcome is great.

3 comments

This is like the one cooking tip I don't stop blathering about in fact. Always season each ingredient individually. Both ensures that the salt is distributed well and makes it easier to get the desired amount in the end product.
Same thing happened with my SO. She's not big into cooking but wanted to try her hand at one of the meals and she kept salting things like she would normally salt them. I told her to only salt to taste and she took issue with that. Once I showed her the how-to videos on the site, though, she saw exactly what I was saying and now she can actually cook pretty decently. :)
I understand what you mean about salting throughout the process, but I [somewhat] disagree that it won't be salty. I've nothing scientific to offer about this opinion, but I feel that we build a tolerance to salt and end up over-salting over time.

A little less than a decade ago, I went almost a month eating only home-cooked meals without any added salt. It wasn't a health thing, but rather an effort to try to learn what my food actually tasted like.

After that, Everything tasted far too salty (including my own cooking when adding any salt) - to the point where I could barely taste the food properly. My tolerance has risen since, but I like to keep my seasoning moderate for that reason.

Then again, I'll also throw a whole stick of butter into pasta sauce on rare occasion - a trick I learned from another chef friend. It took my wife a while to realize why she liked my pasta sauce so much more than her own, and she's definitely a far more seasoned cook than I am.